People, Scrum, XP, Lean, Complexity, Creativity, Fun

November 2009 Blog Posts

Marissa Mayer
Innovation, design and simplicity
This talk was given on March 14, 2008 in Portland, Oregon at the 39th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2008)
From the presentation, important skills set for real-life software projects:
Large projects & legacy code: taking an existing piece of code and changing it
Scale: write code that scale and tests that support that scale requirements
Resilience & Robustness: write algorithms that are inherently robust instead of recurring to manual tuning
Working in team: no...

Perception and Prejudice
You may know the story of the six blind men and the elephant. Each blind man is touching a different part of the elephant.
One is touching the tusk and thinks that it is a spear. Another is touching the leg and thinks it is a tree trunk.
If you tell them that they are all touching the same thing, it is very likely that they will argue about what it is. Unless they are also truthful about their own limitations, it will be difficult for them to come to a unified vision about what...

Even programmers can be whole people in the real world. XP is an opportunity to test yourself, to be yourself, to realize that maybe you've been fine all along and just hanging with the wrong crowd.
And here 2 more:
From OpenAgile Primer, Foundation One: Truthfulness
“Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues” - Bahá'u'lláh
From Mike Cohn, Best Agile Advice Contest Winners
Scrum is like a mirror, use it like one and see your product and your team for what it really is, not what you think it is. It’ll transform the way you think about building anything. - Gabe Brown
What...

The online assessment was about C# and the result was very good, but this does not really matter.
What matter is that I had to answer to every question in a short time (3 minutes) using all I wanted : books, internet, my PC and of course my own knowledge. So the main constraint here was the time, like in the real life you cannot stretch or shorten the time.
What worked best, which was the best strategy ?
...

Key points imho are
share information instead of retain information as a way to exercise strict control
setting goals instead of assigning tasks
let people take responsibilities instead of giving orders
monitor outcomes instead of controlling tasks/activities execution
From the article On the Way to Agile Transparency: Climbing the Big Wall :
Transparency is a major dynamic associated with agile development. ... When broken down, this concept consists of management components such as individual responsibility, commitment, and accountability.
“Organizational responsiveness comes...

Barry Boehm’s principle of top talent, “use better and fewer people" [1] is central to an agile process.
Agile processes strip nonessential activities from projects, leaving developers more time to develop.
Although the difference in productivity between the best and worst programmers on a team may exceed the documented ratio of 10:1 [2] the productivity difference matters most when the programmers are working on tasks essential to software delivery. Productivity differences are irrelevant when the programmers are engaged in nonessential activities....